Dev Take Tuesday - Game Dev Glue

At the recommendation of a good friend—and seemingly the entirety of my Twitter feed—I finally started playing Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. I’m glad I did. I’ve yet to finish, but so far the game has been fun and challenging—not only mechanically, but narratively as well. As you boot up the game, some screen text informs you that professional therapists provided input during development, since the game features a protagonist suffering from mental illness. From the opening credits, this aspect of the game becomes clear. Your protagonist, a young woman named Senua, receives nearly constant input from various voices in her head.

Screen capture of my own play-through of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

I strongly feel that those voices are a glue that holds the rest of the game together. The game does dazzle visually, but I think the alternating mechanics of melee combat and puzzle solving would fall a bit flat without the key representation of Senua’s psychosis through the competing voices in her—and consequently your—head. These voices, of course, fit the game’s narrative themes. But they also bond the narrative to the mechanics in elegant and intriguing ways. During the puzzle sequences, the voices occasionally provide helpful feedback, but more often than not distract with you doubt and deprecation. During combat the voices become a great assistance, giving you supernatural awareness and the chance to avoid strikes from any enemies behind you. Additionally, the voices replace a tutorial UI rather seamlessly, giving the character instructions in a fluid, conversational way. I’ve found myself both grateful and vexed at their constant chattering, and it’s obvious from the narrative that the dev team wanted to highlight this internal struggle.

Certainly Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice would be a solid game even without this one important design inclusion. But the voices show how one simple aspect of the design can really cement the video game into one cohesive piece of art. I believe it’s vital as a game developer to constantly search for anything that will help “glue” your narrative and mechanics together, especially if you want to cover a challenging topic in your game.